The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Unloading supplies from the car, Quilla and Pete stop fighting long enough to give Trisha hope that everything will be alright. As the group starts down the trail under an overcast sky, however, they resume their argument. Trisha prays to God that something will show up to distract Pete, but nothing arrives. Pete and Quilla ignore Trisha’s many attempts to intervene.

After a while, the trail splits into two branches: North Conway and Kezar Notch. Trisha announces that she has to pee, but Pete and Quilla ignore her as they head off along the North Conway fork, still arguing. Exasperated, Trisha walks a little ways down the Kezar Notch trail and steps off the path in the direction of the North Conway fork. She can still hear Quilla and Pete arguing—later, she will recall Pete shouting “—don’t know why we have to pay for what you guys did wrong!” (21). Trisha walks down a small ravine until she’s sure she isn’t visible from the trail anymore. When she is done, she is struck by “the worst idea of her life” (23)—to take a shortcut and go forward instead of backtracking to the Kezar Notch trail. Confidently, she thinks that there is no way she will get lost.

Trisha climbs up the opposite side of the ravine, heading for the main trail. The slope is steeper on this side, and after ten minutes of hauling herself up she feels “the first minnowy flutter of disquiet” (25). She should have arrived at the North Conway branch by now, but she cannot hear the sounds of hikers on the main trail anymore. A mirthless voice in her head informs her that she is lost, but she brushes off the thought and increases her pace. She comes to a fallen tree that is too high to climb over and has to shimmy under it, briefly brushing up against a large snake, which sends her scrambling in panic. It is raining by now, and Trisha slips and falls to the dampening forest floor.

After collecting herself and walking a little further, Trisha can no longer tell if she’s going in the right direction. She returns to the fallen tree to orient herself. As she walks back toward where she thinks the trail is, mosquitos swarm her, but she remembers that her mother once told her slapping at them only makes things worse. Another piece of Quilla’s advice comes to mind when she spots a checkerberry bush and recalls her mother’s assertion that the berries are not only harmless but tasty. Trisha eats a handful of checkerberries and walks on until she reaches a cluster of ferns halfway up a small hill, where she pauses to listen. She hears various sounds—rattling branches, whining mosquitoes, cawing crows—but no human voices. Trisha begins to cry and calls out for help in “the wavery voice of a little kid” (38).

After fifteen minutes of yelling to no avail, Trisha puts her head down and sobs. She tries to reassure herself that Quilla and Pete will have noticed her absence by now. Hoping to avoid becoming “what her mother [calls] A Public Spectacle” (42), Trisha walks faster, unaware that she is turning further and further away from the Appalachian trail and into “deep second-growth woods” (42). When the trail does not appear, she descends into panic, no longer following a straight path or listening for human voices. She starts sprinting, sustaining scratches from the surrounding vegetation. In her panic, she narrowly avoids running off a cliff that suddenly appears before her, managing to stop at the last second by clutching the trunk of a nearby tree. As she looks over the cliff, she experiences a vivid vision of herself falling over the edge and dying with her throat punctured by a branch. After several minutes she loosens her grip on the tree, but as she begins to step back from the drop, black spots begin to form on her vision and she faints.